Hiring an agency in Pakistan: what protects you

The agency market in Pakistan is good and uneven at the same time. There is real talent, a cost base that makes senior work affordable, and a growing number of shops that work for clients abroad. There are also arrangements that leave a client owning nothing after a year of paying. The questions that tell the two apart are the same whether you are buying from Lahore or from London, and none of them is rude to ask.

Who owns the ad account?

The advertising account, the business page, the website, the domain and the tracking all belong in your name, in your own business manager, with the agency added as a partner. That is the single most important line in any agreement and the one most often missing.

The common arrangement here is the reverse: the agency runs your campaigns inside its own account, for a reason that sounds practical. Paying a platform in dollars from Pakistan is awkward, the agency already has a card that works, and it is simpler for everyone. It is simpler right up until you leave, when you discover that the account, the audiences it learned, the tracking data and every result it ever produced belong to someone else. You start again from nothing, and the next agency starts from nothing too.

Ask the question plainly: at the end of this contract, what do I log in to, and what do I keep? If the answer involves exporting a report rather than keeping an account, the price is higher than the fee.

Where does the money go?

Two payments should never be mixed: the fee you pay the agency and the money you spend on ads. The spend goes to the platform, from your card or your business manager, and the agency never touches it. The fee is a flat figure for the work, agreed in advance.

Watch for the fee quoted as a share of spend. It is common, it sounds proportionate, and it rewards the agency for spending more rather than for selling more. Watch too for spend billed through the agency with a margin on top, which is a fee you cannot see. If an agency must run spend on its own card because of how you pay, insist on the platform’s own receipts, every month, with no rounding.

The same applies to anything bought on your behalf — stock photography, software, a freelancer’s time. Receipts, at cost, or in your own name.

What is the notice period?

The length of the lock-in tells you how confident the agency is in its own work. A contract that holds you for a year says the agency expects you to want to leave before the year is out. Thirty days is enough for any honest shop to wind down a campaign, hand over the accounts and write the final report.

Read the exit clause before the scope. What happens to the creative, the audiences, the pages and the passwords on the last day? Who pays for the month of handover? Is there a fee for leaving? A long notice period with a penalty is not a sign of a serious agency. It is a sign of one that does not expect to be kept on merit.

Who will you actually talk to?

The person who pitched you is often not the person who will run the work, and the gap between the two is where quality goes. Ask, before you sign, who writes the monthly report, who sets up the campaigns, who replies when something breaks at nine in the evening, and whether any of those names has changed since the first call.

Then ask what exists outside their heads. Where is your account documented? What would a replacement receive on their first morning? An agency that can show you a redacted handover document from another client has thought about turnover. One that says it never happens has not.

What does a published fee tell you?

A fee on the website tells you two things. The agency has decided what its work is worth, and it is willing to lose the enquiries for which that is the wrong number. Both are good signs. A price that is only available after a discovery call is a price that will be set by what the agency thinks you can pay.

Our own terms, as one example of what a published answer looks like. Starter is $2,000 a month for one of ads, content or search, picked on the first call and not all three. Standard is $4,000 a month for the whole content and findability loop. Tailored is priced to the number you give us. Advertising spend is separate, stays in your own account and is never a percentage of anything. Notice is thirty days. The accounts, the pages and the creative are yours, and the first call is thirty minutes with no deck.

We are not the cheap option and we do not pretend to be. There is always someone cheaper, and the questions above are how you find out what the cheaper price leaves out.

What is different if you are buying from abroad?

Nothing about the five questions, and a little about the consequences. A dispute across two legal systems is not going to court, because pursuing it costs more than the amount in question. So the protection is structural rather than legal: hold every asset in your own accounts, keep the spend on your own card, pay monthly rather than in advance, and keep the notice short. Do all four and the worst outcome of a bad hire is one wasted month.

Ask for the overlap hours in writing, in your time zone, and test them during the pitch by sending a message at the edge of the stated window. Ask who reviews the copy and whether they are from your market. Pay for a small test before you commit to a retainer. These are the same tests you would run on an agency in your own city. The geography only changes how expensive it is to skip them.

A buyer who asks these five questions will lose a few agencies in the first conversation. That is the point. The ones that remain have nothing to hide about the account, the money, the exit, the people or the price — and those are the only ones worth a second call.